ssionary
enterprises.

Then, it is sometimes thought and sometimes said that these men who
conduct church work and missionary work do not know much about dollars;
that a dollar, a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, is a very
indefinite thing; and that they ask for a million dollars, or half a
million dollars, with a great deal of nonchalance, as if it were merely
a matter of asking. It is not so. When this Finance Committee indorse
the recommendation of the National Council that half a million of
dollars be raised for the work of this Association during the coming
year, they do it from a business point of view, and when the officers
and managers of this Association second this demand, they know what it
means. They know better than anybody else in the world knows how hard it
is to get half a million of dollars. For some years I went up and down
through the South and West in the service of this Association. I went in
and out of the rooms at No. 56 Reade Street, New York, and I must have
been very dull not to know pretty well the inside workings of this
Association. I have been among workers on the field. I know how closely
everything is reckoned, how carefully every penny is spent; and I know
how the demands of the work and the needs press upon the workers in the
field, so that they look back to those rooms in New York with the
feeling that somehow there is not a very great deal of liberality there,
that those officers pare very closely. But these workers in the field
have no such experience after all as the officers there at the centre of
things. Those members of the Executive Committee, those Secretaries and
the Treasurer, sitting there together, and facing the demands of the old
work and the new, have rolled upon them every day a sense of the value
of money and of the need of economy such as even the workers in the
field can not comprehend. I have been there, I am now outside, and I am
free to say whatever I please; and I make bold to say to you here that
the work which is alive and growing must have the most money. Increased
demands must cost. It is a law of nature. Now, then, when this Finance
Committee come forward to indorse this recommendation that $500,000
instead of $375,000 be raised for the coming year, they do not at all
reach the measure of the need.

There is only one thing necessary to get this money and more. It is a
pretty comprehensive thing. If upon the members of our churches in this
land as cl